Honour to maid Marian, And to all the Sherwood-clan! Though their days have hurried by Let us two a burden try. 60 (61-2) Line 61 originally began with Though their Pleasures; and the final line stands in the draft thus You and I a stave will try. The reading of the text is in the finished manuscript, as well as in the first edition. TO AUTUMN. I. SEASON of mists and mellow fruitfulness, To swell the gourd, and plump the hazel shells And still more, later flowers for the bees, Until they think warm days will never cease, For Summer has o'er-brimm'd their clammy cells. 2. Who hath not seen thee oft amid thy store? Sometimes whoever seeks abroad may find Thee sitting careless on a granary floor, This poem seems to have been just composed when Keats wrote to Reynolds from Winchester his letter of the 22nd of September 1819. He says "How beautiful the season is now. How fine the air-a temperate sharpness about it. Really, without joking, chaste weather-Dian skies. I never liked stubble-fields so much as nowaye, better than the chilly green of the Spring. Somehow, a stubble plain looks warm, in the same way that some pictures look warm. This struck me so much in my Sunday's walk that I composed upon it." Thy hair soft-lifted by the winnowing wind; Drows'd with the fume of poppies, while thy hook Or by a cyder-press, with patient look, Thou watchest the last oozings hours by hours. 3. Where are the songs of Spring? Ay, where are they? And touch the stubble-plains with rosy hue; Or sinking as the light wind lives or dies; And full-grown lambs loud bleat from hilly bourn; Hedge-crickets sing; and now with treble soft The red-breast whistles from a garden-croft; And gathering swallows twitter in the skies. (3) The term Hedge-crickets for grasshoppers in line 9 resumes very happily the whole sentiment of Keats's competition sonnet On the Grasshopper and Cricket. See Volume I, page 83. 小 revisiones not décorded. q. copy of ODE ON MELANCHOLY. I. No, no, go not to Lethe, neither twist Wolf's-bane, tight-rooted, for its poisonous wine; Nor suffer thy pale forehead to be kiss'd By nightshade, ruby grape of Proserpine; Make not your rosary of yew-berries, Nor let the beetle, nor the death-moth be Your mournful Psyche, nor the downy owl A partner in your sorrow's mysteries; For shade to shade will come too drowsily, C A And drown the wakeful anguish of the soul.' Lord Houghton gives the following stanza as the intended open ing of the Ode, from the original manuscript: Though you should build a bark of dead men's bones, And rear a phantom gibbet for a mast, Stitch shrouds together for a sail, with groans To fill it out, blood-stained and aghast ; Although your rudder be a dragon's tail Long sever'd, yet still hard with agony, Your cordage large uprootings from the skull Of bald Medusa, certes you would fail To find the Melancholy-whether she Dreameth in any isle of Lethe dull. His Lordship adds-"But no sooner was this written, than the poet became conscious that the coarseness of the contrast would destroy the general effect of luxurious tenderness which it was the 2. But when the melancholy fit shall fall 3. She dwells with Beauty-Beauty that must die; Ay, in the very temple of Delight Veil'd Melancholy has her sovran shrine, Though seen of none save him whose strenuous tongue Can burst Joy's grape against his palate fine; His soul shall taste the sadness of her might, object of the poem to produce, and he confined the gross notion of Melancholy to less violent images,..." |